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The latest word on the iPhone is that the 4.0 OS will finally have
honest-to-goodness multitasking. This could hopefully lead to things like a real chat client, and dangerous battery consumption. I still hope it's true.

As a dedicated Android user (and programmer), I still don't see the value of multitasking in a mobile app. The runtime can automatically clean up and restart the application with all the state information necessary if it ceases to run anyway. It's a lot easier to just assume that it's _always_ going to be cleaned up upon suspension, instead of writing code that accounts for the possibility that the app just may be resuming from a paused, but not terminated state.
I haven't used a single Android app, or written any code that I can say honestly benefits from the multitasking aspects of Android. The runtime can shut down my app any time it sees fit. Planning for resumption from an abruptly terminated app is the norm when developing for Android anyway. The way I see it, the apps would have more resources if the platform didn't have to multitask.

The multitasking aspect is essential for things like keeping an instant messenger or VoIP app running in the background (a 24/7 scenario here)...

Although I've got to say - most Android IM apps suck at staying connected in the background. Fring, eBuddy, Nimbuzz - they all disconnect (and then don't reconnect automatically!) or crash after a while...

I was using my Nokia E71 the other day and it was tracking my walking using GPS (Sports tracker) in the background. I was checking directions with Ovi maps and looking things up online in the browser. So all were running at once.

In your world my tracker application would been killed the moment I switched to another tool. That it totally useless and the reason I will never use an iPhone as long as multitasking is missing.

Personally, I prefer it this way. When I'm using any app the only thing I want interrupting me is a phone call. And the only thing I want running in the background is iPod, which already does. If multitasking third party apps becomes an option I'll probably turn it off.

Actually, if you have a halfways intelligent notification system, that's not a problem at all. My Palm Pre does all that multitasking, and I've never had a phone call interrupted by anything. We've got over 2k apps now for the Pre in about 8-9 months, and I've got a lot of apps running on my phone, and I've never had a phone call interrupted by any app. We get notifications that show up as a little icon on the bottom of the screen, so when the phone call is done, I tap it and deal with it then. Or, I can choose to deal with it during the call if I so choose. In fact, I frequently open up my email while in a call on my Pre, because people call me all the freaking time and ask me if I got that email they sent. Or my calendar. Once, I opened up solitaire during a long conference call and had the call on speaker.

Its kinda cool - having multitasking on my Symbian phone. While a web page is loading (thanks at&t - fastest network alive... cough cough) I can flip over and check my email, or change a track on an album I'm listening to.

Your argument is so similar to the ones the ms-dos users on our local bbs used to use when I told them how wonderful multi-tasking on my Amiga was. In other words - I don't have it and I'm glad for it!

My response was always something like - I like listening to music, managing files, editing graphics etc etc while responding to this post - while the machine was busy applying a filter, copying a file or playing a mod I was still typing away on another app.

There are plenty of UI design concerns as well. Currently there is no standard UI for dealing with apps running in the background. The phone gives you a green bar across the top of the screen. The iPod gives you a special alert with buttons when you double click the home button and a play icon in the top right of the screen. The calendar doesn't have any UI at all, it just alerts you with a message. The Mail app displays a numeric badge and plays a sound (a feature available to all 3rd party apps using the notification API).

It will be interesting to see how they unify the UI for running multiple apps at once without compromising the usability of the device.

My guess is that everything will basically look and function the same, except the App's icon will have a glow or a badge indicating that it is running in the background. Each app will have to explicitly be granted permission to be able to run in the background by the user (same way each app has to be allowed to send notifications now).

The Mail app displays a numeric badge and plays a sound (a feature available to all 3rd party apps using the notification API).

I don't think this is strictly true. I believe that the Mail app is running, and is able to set its badge unilaterally. The 3rd party notification API requires some application NOT running on the phone to notify Apple to send a message to the phone to set the badge on the app, which isn't running. The effect for the end user is largely the same, but the mechanism is radically dif

Or maybe they'll cave and have another button to "tab" between applications or just holding down the one they have will do it. I'm sure they'll come up with something but in the mean time I'll probably switch to Verizon and the Droid because it'll cost less and do more.

Already being on Verizon, the Droid cost me an additional $30/month over the cost of service for a non-smart phone. It's a family plan.. we have four phones on for slightly over $100 per month. The general prices between AT&T and Verizon aren't significantly different... one may be better or worse, depending on the specifics of what you want. The data plan, at least for individuals, is the same... "unlimited" data for smart phones (where "unlimited" in both cases is subject to arbitrary definitions, both companies will go after you if you're using more data than they think possible under their license... like tethering)

As for coverage, the entire Verizon network is 3G, only about 20% of AT&T's (by area, not by population) is 3G. That's nothing more than the difference between CDMA and GSM... the CDMA 3G protocols run over the same frequencies and bandwidth used for 2G/Voice, while GSM always requires additional bandwidth, and often, additional frequencies. This is further compounded by today's AT&T being a mix of two previous companies, Cingular and AT&T Mobility. Cingular bought AT&T Mobility to become the country's second largest cellular network, after Verizon. But AT&T Mobility was using DAMPS (they called it "TDMA"), not GSM. So the company has spent many years just establishing full 2G GSM coverage and phasing out DAMPS (the DAMPS network went dark in mid 2008). This is also why AT&T's slightly more likely to drop calls than other GSM networks... DAMPS has slightly better coverage than GSM, so upgraded DAMPS cells are often not ideally placed for GSM.

At its peak, the AT&T network is faster than Verizon's. Regular HSPA cells deliver up to 3.6Mb/s down to clients, versus 3.1Mb/s down to clients for CDMA's EvDO Rev A. By this summer, AT&T will have HSPA+ coverage in as many as 40 cities, which can deliver 7.2Mb/s down to clients, if you have a fast enough phone (you'll need an iPhone 3GS for this, and the iPhones are all still crippled on the upload side... HSPA+ can go upstream at up to 2Mb/s, but iPhones only do 384kb/s). All networks degrade over distance, and all fall back to "EDGE" speeds if you're too far from a cell site for 3G performance. AT&T and Verizon both have an advantage in range, though, generally being the companies owning one of the two 850MHz slots available in any area of the USA. You get much better range at 850MHz than at 1900MHz... Sprint does its 3G at 1900MHz (and WiMax 4G at 2500MHz, though they don't have any 4G phones out yet), T-Mobile does 2G at 1900MHz and 3G split between 1700MHz and 2100MHz. Verizon is starting 4G service at 700MHz this summer, using the LTE standard; AT&T will be starting 4G next year, also at 700MHz (Verizon won the largest 700MHz spectrum block, 20MHz of spectrum, while AT&T got the other big win here, 12MHz worth of spectrum).

The (jailbroken) app "Backgrounder" handles it quite well. It displays a small activity-wheel icon on apps that are currently running in the background. It also does this for the native Apple apps that run in the background. What's so hard about that?

Multitasking has never been a huge security problem, so long as inter-process communication is disabled. Sure, it introduces file and device access control issues, but the OS should be handling that properly, multitasking or not.

For the record, the iPhone does have the ability for apps to save their state, which is a poor man's multitasking. But true multitasking isn't really necessary in a form factor like the iPhone. A desktop PC, sure, a laptop, maybe, but it's rare to ever be doing multiple things at on

You haven't really used an iPod Touch or iPhone, have you? You also haven't read many replies in this discussion, or the numerous threads in other discussions that give reasons for multitasking on these devices.

Most games that I've played which have sound allow you to disable it so that you can listen to music. If you use a streaming service to get music, you'd like to continue while performing other tasks.

Even the iPod/iPhone allows this. I can listen to music through my iPod Touch's native music player app while playing a game without a problem. It's only the use of third-party music players like Pandora that are blocked here.

I'm not saying that there's no use at all for multitasking, but I agree with the GP that for the great majority of users, "save-state-and-switch-app" is a good enough solution.

Pandora must be thrilled that they're essentially the poster child for what's wrong with the lack of m

I realize I'm an edge case, but I've been known to be listening to streaming music while having an ssh session open in MobileTerminal to my server to check on something, with Facebook and a chat client running in the background that I switch over to now and then.

I've used the various add-ons that make multi-tasking possible on iPhone OS 3.1.2. Of course, I just mean "being able to run multiple GUI applications at once" by this statement, but that's kinda what it means in the popular, non-technical press...

I have a few observations.

First, some applications react very well to running in this mode. In fact, most of the ones I've tried do act well. I can get my facebook updates, have my chat client running, etc. So long as I'm careful with memory usage, things are

You may want to Google on iphonevm . It's a virtual memory implementation for jailbroken iphone/ipods. Standard warnings about write cycles on flash apply, but it's made a huge difference with my multitasking on my iPod touch.

If it isn't ready for prime-time release to 3rd party developers it can't be compared to what everybody expects a true multitasking OS to be. When they get some engineering talent in there who can write a multi-tasking phone OS that can intelligently handle any number of apps, 3rd party included, simultaneously then it will be able to join the club.

Locking it down to out-of-the-box Apple apps only is tacit admission that if they let any app multi-task the iPhone would be brought to it's knees.

It ensures there are no daemons running, making it nearly impossible to have a botnet of iPhones.With multitasking, how do you know that a thread doesn't get spawned off that now runs and listens on an arbitrary port for incoming connections?

There are real uses for multitasking, which the iPhone already does - like listening to iPod while surfing or the like. Maybe chat as mentioned, but I also hope to set which apps can be multitasking - I don't trust the developers always to make the correct call - there is no reason to leave a game running in the background while I surf, it would be better to save state. I would actually say saving state and resuming again is better the vast majority of times over running in the background.

But oftentimes I try to hang up the phone by hitting the home button instead of the end call button (even though I think I did), and while surfing, I still see that "Return to Call" blinking on top.

To conserve battery life, I already turned off push notifications and other things. And I would turn off multitasking for my parents phones, they hardly can use a computer as it. With this, they'll only be wondering why the phone battery is dying even faster.

As an iPhone developer, I can tell you this just isn't coming. Apple has lots of (NDA'd) guidelines about how much CPU juice you get (since iPod etc can work through your app) and this would seriously topsy turvey the existing software base. They have gone out of their way to make a UI that works well without multitasking, and stuff like APNS was engineer specifically not to require it.

Aside from having my SSH sessions die when I want to goto an email or phone call, multi tasking has never actually been lac

There are real uses for multitasking, which the iPhone already does - like listening to iPod while surfing or the like. Maybe chat as mentioned, but I also hope to set which apps can be multitasking - I don't trust the developers always to make the correct call - there is no reason to leave a game running in the background while I surf, it would be better to save state.

Good point. The major reason that I look forward to multi-tasking is that I believe it to be a requirement for true VPN applications. It would be nice to be able to use my iPhone to VPN through our firewall at work so that I can handle emergency systems admin tasks.

Just as it took till 3.0 for Apple to introduce copy and paste, it will take them till 4.0 to introduce multitasking for exactly the same reason. They want to do it right. Copy and paste on the iPhone is intuitive and easy, but they didn't figure out how to do it in such a great way immediately. Rest assured, Apple won't do multitasking like Android, you won't need a task manager. Whatever form it takes, Apple will err on the side of making it limiting but easy to use.

I think the key, especially for your parents, is making it very obvious as to whether you are closing or backgrounding a program. That's one of the things I hate about my Blackberry Curve 8330. Almost every app is different, some you "Exit", some you "Close", some close when you hit the back button, some stay open when you hit the back button.

It makes it a pain in the ass to try and figure out what all you have running.

At one point when looking into developing an Application for the iphone, one of the requirements for *all* apps is that it had to be able to close with in a small time window upon hitting the home button as to kill any chance of running more than 1 app at a time.
The reason for this, as I read it, was to avoid having a ton of applications running (w/o the user aware) and killing battery time and other software conflicts. I'm not really sure thats a bad thing. I can remember with my blackberry, If I got a

The OS kills any application after 5 seconds that does not end itself when told to quit. It has nothing to do with preventing 2 apps from running at the same time. Rather, it is because there is no provision to switch apps in the UI, so if the app didn't quit quickly, it would appear to hang the phone.

The only requirement on timing is that state must be saved quickly to avoid data loss when the watchdog kills the process.

Android does not actually run the other applications that are in the background. The only things allowed to run in the background are "services" that some of those apps rely on for things that need to continue. This gets confusing to users as in some apps (take Pandora as an example) the service is 90% of what you want the app doing, and the actual app is only a thin skin over the top.

If Apple does go the route of "background apps", then I hope they adopt a similar model, but are even more aggressive on res

But if they do allow multitasking, I hope Apple becomes MORE restrictive on what they let on the App store. I don't want crap apps sucking my battery down.

As a developer concerned with power usage I would like more access to tell the OS things like how often I need a GPS location update. You can tell the API to update your app when you have moved x distance, but that implies the OS is watching movement constantly and only updates you every so often. I'd also like to shut down such resources when on a scr

This is why I jailbroke the thing in the first place (well, that, and a few other things): multitasking for everything, not just Apple's apps. For some time now, I have been able to listen to music and browse the web, text, chat, etc. by just switching apps. It works fairly decently, too, and doesn't make it very slow. I am simply amazed they decided this was a proper limitation.

Backgrounder's probably the single biggest reason I have mine jailbroken. I'm always amazed at the people freaking out like multitasking would cause the thing to explode. People have been multitasking on it for years now. I've had a couple issues with backgrounding and sound, but that's about it. For the most part it's worked great for me.

For some time now, I have been able to listen to music and browse the web, text, chat, etc. by just switching apps.

Uh, you do know you can do that with a non-jailbroken iPhone, right? You didn't mention anything that a stock iPhone is incapable of doing so, if that's why you jailbroke your iPhone, you wasted your time... If there are other apps that you're running with backgrounder, fine, but that was a bad list of example tasks given the iPhone can do that out of the gate.

I am not sure why I want multitasking on the iPhone. The stated use is to allow a chat window to be always present. What would that look like though, a piece of my small screen dedicated to such an application? Does this mean I have a small browser window.

In the old days, we had background processes that always had to run. Now we have signals and the like that can awake idle processes so they do not have to run. Then we had TSR applications, and similar items on the Mac, like the Talking Moose. The former was created to solve the long start up time of applications on DOS and Windows. Multiple windows and such were useful on the PC, with larger screens, but somewhat harder to use on the Mac. The Mac seemed to launch applications faster, so I don't have a recollections of being annoyed that Finder was not multitasking.

Multitasking is a solution to solve some problem on the general computer. I am not sure it is the right solution for a small screen mobile small battery device. I would rather see innovative solutions rather than rehashing the same old thing. I think there this might be a useful solution for the iPad. My concern is that iPhone 4.0 is built for the next iPhone, and will make current iPhones harder to use. This is what happened with iPhone 3.0, which does not run very well on the first generation iPhone.

I can only give an example based on the Blackberry, the iPhone implementation (if it ever happens) may be entirely different.

There is a section of the home screen devoted to a "notification area" (similar to the one found in Windows, at least in concept). Any application that wants to handle push-type notifications registers with the OS, so notifications (ringtones, number of vibrations, whether it blinks the LED, etc) are all handled through the same place you choose your ringtones for calls.

It's for the iPad, because millions of fanboy^H^H^H^H^H^H early developers shat themselves when the iPad was revealed to have no multitasking. The iPhone is fine the way it is, and could continue in its present state for quite a while without multitasking (outside of the OS centric parts, like time and calendar, etc.). This is *all* about the iPad. I for one am very happy to see this, as the lack of multitasking was one thing that told me not to bother with the iPad.

I've had my Nokia N900 for a couple of months now, and for those unaware, most of the specs are identical to the iPhone 3Gs 32Gb. Well, except that it has a much higher resolution screen, a keyboard, a real GPS, an FM transmitter and a microUSB port for data and charging. But the CPU/GPU and amount of storage are the same, except that you can also add a microSD card to the N900. But now on to the most important difference to the 3Gs. I've used both my N900 and a 3Gs, and the 3Gs just feels sluggish, while having half the functionality.

Flipping home screens on the N900, regardless of how many icons and widgets it's running is smooth, with no clipping. Even with half a dozen apps running in the background, the UI remains equally fast (several instances of the Firefox, Application Manager, Communication app, Contacts app, Skype, MediaBox, battery-eye, conky, etc). Flipping through the 3Gs icon screens clips and feels choppier. It's not a large difference, but keep in mind the hardware is identical and the iPhone has NO applications running in the background.

The N900 also starts up applications faster, in most cases instantaneously. Start up times do increase progressively after about 3-4 large apps are already loaded and actually doing stuff in the background (Firefox loading up pages, Application Manager checking for updates, MediaBox playing music). But many utilities that only refresh while in the foreground do not have any impact at all (Conky, battery-eye, disk usage, etc). In contrast, the 3Gs takes a couple of seconds to load up pretty much every app I tried, regardless of how limited its functionality is, and complex apps take even longer.

Once the apps are running, they are roughly equally fast on both the N900 and the 3Gs. But as I stated above, the N900 may be running several apps in the background, and the foreground apps do not slow down at all.

I think this is why Apple did not allow multitasking up to now. Given how slowly single apps load on their flagship 3Gs, true multitasking will bring it down to its knees. The iPhone OS takes much more resources to run than Maemo or Android, and the iPhone single tasking is a way of masking it. Of course this is speculation since except for the basic Apple apps, nobody managed run more than one app at the same time on the iPhone. And I'm sure those Apple apps are optimized and tweaked to hook into the OS and stay loaded at all times. Most likely the 4G will have a faster processor and more RAM, and will compensate for the OS shortcomings through brute force.

I think this is why Apple did not allow multitasking up to now. Given how slowly single apps load on their flagship 3Gs, true multitasking will bring it down to its knees.

People do jailbreak their phones and use Backgrounder, and they don't generally report any problems running multiple applications at once, no "bring it to its KNEES!" issues anyways. It does make the thing a bit less ergonomic to use, since you suddenly have to deal with a task manager...

Your post has made me curious and I'm watching now the review of the N900 right here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PvPTBwEg5UA [youtube.com]Now, I dunno if my perception is screwed or something but the apps on there take 2-4 seconds to launch and the touchscreen does lag tiny little bit in some of them.On the other hand the apps on the vilified 3gs load - as far as my perception is concerned - within 1-2 seconds.

The latest N900 firmware resolved a LOT of issues. Not sure what firmware the review phone is using, but looking at his theme, it's an older one. My N900 with firmware 3.2010.02-8.002 released about a month ago loads up ALL apps faster than in the review. Same goes for the touchscreen lag. The next firmware, due to be released in a couple of weeks will improve things even further.

But that's not all.:) The N900 also gets faster as you use it. After a cold boot the RAM has 100Mb used, but after loading all sorts of apps it goes up to 153Mb and stays there. Those extra 50Mb contain cashing data for all your apps. I just tried every app I could think of: Communications (SMS and IM), Firefox, Contacts, Phone, Media Player (not MediaBox), Disk Usage, battery-eye, Settings, Application Manager, File Manager, Xterm, PDF Reader, Email. Every single one loaded up instantly, in less than 1 sec.

The only offender is MediaBox, because it insists on scanning your entire device for music, movies, etc. BTW, the N900 can play regular AVI movies without dropping frames or losing sound sync, AND it can output to any TV. I watched 9 (the entire animation movie) full screen on my HD TV the other day.:))

And I NEVER need to reboot my N900, it's rock solid. Even if the first time you start the apps it takes as long as on the iPhone, after 10 mins of use it's much faster.

Except that the iPhone does run Apple apps in the back ground. The OS has a number of things running to be able to receive a call, keep it touch with the tower, update the battery icon, the signal bars, etc.Even though 3rd party apps can't run in the back ground, the iPhone is running several tasks all the time. Its just those task were all written by apple.I haven't seen the N900, so I can't speak to the speed difference.

Well olddotter, the N900 has to perform all the phone related tasks you've listed as well. So your point doesn't apply.

I am getting at least 1 day for a charge, usually 2 days. BUT here's how I use it:

- 1-2h worth of phone conversations over GSM with a BT headset.- 1-2h a day as an ebook reader. Fbreader is AWSOME, between my old N800, N810 and now N900, I think I read 100 books using these devices.- Constantly connected to WiFi (where available, which is almost everywhere for me) or 3G, checking my gmail accounts every 5 mins throughout the day, being available on skype, etc.

Actually, the kind of background processing that the Newton used, which has some things in common with what Android does (specifically Android "services"), would be awesome. The main problem is that developers are really not used to working this way.

Basically, you have your main app, and it runs when it's in the foreground, and that's it. But you also have these other chunks of code that the app can register with the system. On the Newton you could attach that code to the OS-level alarm mechanism ("when this alarm that I just asked the system service to execute for me at that timestamp fires, don't show a dialog box or play a sound, run this bytecode instead"). On Android, it can be a daemon-like thing that actually runs in the background (eg. to play streaming music).

The fundamental idea is that the whole app isn't doing background processing -- instead you break of very small pieces and those run in the background, under much more severe constraints. (The distinction between cron-like and daemon-like isn't really critical here. The developer still has to be trained to break their app up into distinct pieces with different constraints, instead of having one big app.)

This is simply not the architecture a lot of developers are used to (though Unix folk have a head start). But it's a way to provide actual real usable multitasking on a device like this without crushing the memory and battery usage (especially if you use the alarm-based method and your apps can schedule the alarms far apart; for some apps this is more than adequate).

Some programmers would certainly yell if they had to jump through that kind of hoop. But something like that could very well be the best compromise on these devices.

I can't stand hearing everyone talk about multitasking on things like Android devices as though it works the same way as it does on their desktop PC. Nothing could be further from the truth.

The first form of multitasking on Android is that applications can elect to receive messages, e.g. "someone is calling", or "wifi state changed".

If you actually need to do constant work in the background (e.g., listening on a network port), you can do so as well, using a "service". And even services will be killed by the system if resources are needed.

No one is talking about running a Handbrake encode session, Firefox with a bunch of animated Flash ads, and a kernel compile at the same time on their phone.

Multitasking on a phone is being able to record breadcrumbs of a journey with a GPS app, listen to streaming internet radio, and receive notifications from an instant messaging client at the same time.

It is and it isn't. Apple seems to think they've finally hit on the much anticipated "computer as consumer appliance" while most geeks think it should just be a computer which does phone calls. This is the reason for most of the controversy around some aspects of the iPhone and iPad.

What if I want to use a streaming music player and some other app at the same time? As it stands, current iPhone OS is capable of multitasking the built-in iPod software with other apps, but not streaming music with other apps.

Well if multi tasking is implemented as a series of call backs so that any process that is waiting on data is not consuming clock cycles then there should be no more drain when "multitasking" then when running one application. I have never written anything in objective C but with most of my embedded c programming I am able to put any processes that is not doing anything to sleep, so it does not consume extra power.

As far as I can tell using the backgrounder on my jail broken iphone when not actively working

Push notifications were supposed to do this. The app has most of its logic on the server, and only pushes things to the iPhone when needed. (Push notifications are a relatively new feature, so they may not be all they're hyped up to be.) I think that's the iPhone-blessed (ugh!) way of "getting a series of call backs"

If iPhone OS 4.0 allows background tasks -- and I'm not convinced it will -- they really only become useful if the background process is *not* sleeping. Examples of background processes would

+5,000,000,000,000 Informative. Do people really think that, unlike what happens on every other frigging UN*X on the planet, processes on iPhone OS would spin in a busy loop when they're waiting for something to happen, rather than just blocking?

Well if multi tasking is implemented as a series of call backs so that any process that is waiting on data is not consuming clock cycles

iPhone OS is a UN*X; multi-tasking is ultimately implemented as "calls that wait for something to happen end up making a system call and the process blocks".

then there should be no more drain when "multitasking" then when running one application.

...unless, for example, an app is continuously updating the display, showing an animated ad, or displaying a game screen, or.... Perhaps the app would be told "you're going into the background, stop updating the screen (but don't necessarily stop playing audio)".

s far as I can tell using the backgrounder on my jail broken iphone when not actively working most programs still consume cycles.

What indicates that they're consuming cycles, rather than just blocked in a system call?

So almost all of this could be fixed if the wait() call is not properly implemented in the lib.

As per another comment of mine, iPhone OS being a UN*X, wait() is the call you use if you've started a subprocess (fork()/vfork(), posix_spawn()) and you wait to wait for it to exit. There is no single call that is the call to wait for something to happen - there are a whole bunch of blocking system calls such as read(), recv(), recvmsg(), connect(), etc., as well as the usual wait-for-events calls such as select(), poll(), and kevent(), plus the Mach messaging calls. Most apps probably use higher-level APIs that are built atop them.

jailbroken iPhones can run pandora streaming in the background while doing other stuff (including email, web, etc)... the same as the iPod background mode. Honestly that was my number one reason to jailbreak.

Obviously, they do want it. And I was in the "geez, why doesn't Apple enable true multi-tasking?" crowd along with most other people. However, after playing with my new iPod touch (thanks sis - she knows I'm too cheap to buy this stuff myself) and comparing it to my Android, I think Apple is smart.

The Apple UI is so smooth compared to Android's, there really is no comparison. I HATE lag when I'm dealing with a UI, and Android's multi-tasking Java based applications take a good 1-3 seconds to do anything I tell them to do. If there's any chance Apple would have impacted their UI performance to enable multi-tasking, I think they made a great move.

I still wouldn't switch from an Android to an iPhone because of the restrictions (and I'm not going to wager hundreds of dollars on a jailbreak), but now I see why people enjoy Apple products.

What Android phone do you have? My Motorola Droid is mostly instantious (give or take a few milliseconds) unless it's low on memory. Sure it has the occasional slowdown, but 98%+ of button presses are more or less instant.

I have no problem with the Android UI. It's pretty damn simple. Press the button on what you want to do, and there is an auxillary button for options. I havn't used an Iphone, but what do they do that's really so much better?

I've got the first t-mobile phone; I bought it a year or so ago, so the hardware is a bit slower. But I find that when I've got browsers going, along with my background weather program and I fire up a map or a game, things are extremely slow. Yes, I could go in and close everything down, but with Apple I hop from one task to the next. However, even if I did close everything down, the UI wouldn't be as responsive (again, maybe it's the hardware or the multiple Android OS patches that have been sent my way

Really? I've had quite the opposite experience with my Droid. Lots of freezing/crashing, and lots of instances of programs continuing to run in the background when I want them closed draining my battery and heating up my phone. If I didn't loath AT&T so much I'd go back to the iPhone in a heartbeat, multitasking or no. As it is, I'm hoping the 2.1 patch (if it ever gets here) at least irons out a few of the kinks.

What android phone are you using? I have a nexus one and it is just as snappy as any Iphone, at a considerably higher resolution. There are also optimization techniques that Google hasn't made prime-time yet, that really increase the overall performance of all apps running in a dalvik vm: zipalign-on-install.

Apple's decision to not include multitasking from the start was likely a decision to keep things as simple as possible. Now they're playing catch-up and tacking on multi-tasking to a system that w

I don't think it would be that difficult from a third party app's point of view. The background app's state could still be "off", just like it is now. Then app makers could release a new version that supports multitasking in a background state if they feel their app could make some use of this.

I think Steve Jobs was just waiting for CPU/memory/battery capacity to catch up to the point where multitasking will be smooth enough that he's happy with it. He's a control freak and a perfectionist, and if something doesn't work just right, he'd rather omit it altogether than include an inferior implementation. That's why Copy & Paste took so long to arrive on iPhone OS.

I'm still using an original 2G iPhone, and I'm wondering whether iPhone OS 4.0 will be able to run on my device. Steve might decide t

Beejive seems to handle messages well enough with push notifications if you have to switch out to another app for a bit and most modern (hell even ICQ) chat services can handle offline messages. It can also do multiple chat sessions/services at the same time so you don't need multitasking to do that.

The screen is rather small as it is for just doing one thing at a time so if I'm not in the chat app I don't won't chat windows taking up all or some of the window when I'm doing something else.

Can you name any of these operators that operate in the United States, home of Apple, Slashdot, and myself? I'd like to see citations about this so that I can understand the limitations of SMS-to-speech.

And also - an iPhone isn't a landline.

Allow me to rephrase: You can't SMS from an iPhone to a U.S. land line or from a U.S. land line to an iPhone. Nor can you SMS with an iPod Touch.

Can you name any of these operators that operate in the United States, home of Apple, Slashdot, and myself? I'd like to see citations about this so that I can understand the limitations of SMS-to-speech.

The iPhone side of the connection doesn't work with Sprint. As for the land line side, Sprint spun off its home phone service division into EMBARQ, which is now part of CenturyLink. Google centurylink land-line sms is failing me; can you provide more information?